Hi all Inliners,
Someone asked me a while back if I wanted to work on Perl6 <-> Java
integration. That made me start thinking about the future of
Inline::Java and how it could be integrated with Perl 6.
It also made me realize that every time we want to integrate language
X with language Y, we must (usually) start everything over again.
After some exchanges with Tim Bunce about his plans for the future of
DBI, I came up with the idea of some sort of generic API for accessing
functions/objects/.. in a given language. See it as a kind of ODBC for
programming language elements.
Suppose a C language API is created, something along the lines of
perlembed or JNI, that would allow you to do stuff like this:
interpreter *interp = create_interpreter("perl") ; /* or "java",
"python", ... */
object *o = create_object(interp, "SomeClass", <some way to express
arguments>) ;
value *v = call_method(o, "some_method", <some way to express arguments>) ;
/* ... */
Then, ideally, you could write the Java or Perl or Python backend once
and then have frontends to this C API in all languages access all the
different backends through the same interface.
I'm not even sure that this is feasable, but at this point I'm just
looking for ideas/comments/suggestions. Here are some questions:
- Does this seem like a good idea? Theoretically? Practically?
- Has any one ever heard of existing projects that have tried to do this?
- How does this fit in to Perl 6? I think that Perl 6 already provides
for stuff like this, but I'm not I understand how.
- Since this is not really a Perl project per say, what are other
places I can bring this idea up for discussion?
Anyway, I just thought I'd throw this idea out there and see what
folks thing of it.
Patrick
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Patrick LeBoutillier
Laval, Québec, Canada
